Dark Pattern Games
darkpattern.games
darkpattern.games
For context around my motivation to make the site. I was really addicted to a certain mobile game to the point that it was affecting my work and family life. I stumbled upon an article about how game companies hire psychologists to make the games more addicting. This led me down a rabbit hole of researching dark patterns. It was very eye opening and by learning about the dark patterns they lost their power over me. I was able to quit playing the addictive game. I still play games, I just pick better games and the dark patterns don’t work on me anymore. The research and education that I gave myself was so helpful in restoring balance to my life that I wanted to share it with others. Hence the website. It’s about 7 years old.
The most important part of my site is the text descriptions of the dark patterns. The crowd sourced game reviews are probably spam and rubbish and I’ve been meaning to remove them. I had written code to scrape the iOS and android stores to automatically add new games but this code broke ages ago and I never fixed it. The game listings are years out of date. I had plans to include console and pc games but never got around to it. I moved on to other projects.
I have received many emails over the years from people who say that my site has helped them stop or avoid playing addictive games. This makes me happy.
I agree with you that Blizzard didn't stand to directly earn from the D2 grind, but it's valid to not want to participate in a time-sink.
Multiplayer? I loved the asymmetrical co-op ones like It Takes Two, The Past Within, Tick Tock: A Tale For Two.
Give me an experience that is thoughtful and enjoyable over one that is intended to frustrate any day. The Seance of Black Manor, The Return of the Obra Dinn, The Outer Wilds, Star of Providence, Disco Elysium, etc. etc.
Though a few nitpicks:
- on the identified patterns themselves. Grind, infinite treadmill aren't inherently dark. Lots of games grind is filler, or even the game, I play lots of incremental/idle games which are in some respects grind/infinite incarnate. Grind tends to only be truly dark pattern when used as a tool to promote micro-transactions.
- Social Obligation / Guilds are also not inherently dark or even the fault of the developer. Pretty much any multiplayer game will see that kind of obligation develop from first principles. Also sometimes "that's the game" Only if the developer is specifically leveraging aspects of that to further addiction would it be considered dark vs a facet of the game itself.
- Low vote skew: Scoring something based on only a few inputs is a problem for any review service but here I think it has potential to skew results in both directions. It would be more fair to weigh votes below a certain threshold (maybe 10) less and maybe even use a different color to indicate a game that's leaning light/dark but doesn't have enough data.
I see at least some of the patterns we came up with appear on the site. Happy to answer any questions about it all, I think we were the first to write about dark patterns in games, at least academically. It was 2013 so predated Overwatch loot boxes, which I am sure I would have put in there, but now they seem quite tame.
I do want to get ahead of something many of the comments here made: we were very aware that one person's dark pattern was another's benefit eg Animal Crossing's appointment mechanics make it easy to just play for a bit then put it down for the day and come back tomorrow. We went back and forth a lot about how to phrase this dichotomy, as we knew it was the stickest point of the whole plan. That's why the paper's Abstract immediately addresses it: "Game designers are typically regarded as advocates for players. However, a game creator’s interests may not align with the players’." Alignment was the key: are the players and designers in agreement, or is there tension where the designer (or, more usually nowadays, bean counters) is trying to exploit the players in some dimension?
So yeah, happy to answer questions about it.
PS I would be remiss not to mention the rebuttal paper "Against Dark Game Design Patterns" https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/156460/1/DiGRA_202...
So I love that you linked the rebuttal paper. In the last paragraph the authors mention that some ideas could lead to "fruitful analytic or empirical starting points" - did anyone follow up on these? From your perspective, what are the most interesting directions in this area of research today?
My read from the paper was that Deturding was getting at in his rebuttal was my paper that was getting really popular for citing (now over 500) when really it was some Stuff Made Up By Some Guys. And it was! We all had backgrounds in pattern research, but even things like the Gang of Four are just Stuff Made Up By Some Guys. He reviewed my book that I span off from my thesis which contained the patterns so he was intimately aware of it all. We were friendly, if not capital-F friends, and I was interested in what he wrote for my academic career. He's a smart guy.
My co-authors and I never intended for the paper to be a be-all-and-end-all at 2013. Much of the non-AI research work in games at that time was "well, what if we poked at this avenue of research? what if we poked at that avenue?" And we did that by coming up with papers that were supposed to trigger conversation. It was not a good idea to go down a research avenue for 5 years only to find out no-one cared or someone had an idea that would have changed the direction dramatically had you just gotten something out there in year 1. So we thought hard about what we wrote, but we didn't do legwork tying it back to behavioral economics or something like that (my thesis attempted that to varying degrees of success).
I gave up some time ago trying to track where all the citations were coming from, but it did seem it was being cited because other people cited it. It wasn't really related to many of the papers, and certainly I didn't see anything directly building from it. And that's really what the rebuttal was saying: stop citing this paper unless you're building from it and making it more rigid in its foundations. It's not got the strong analytic/empirical basis that science is about. Which is 100% true, but was 100% known and somewhat by design.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390642492_Dark_Patt...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396437975_All_'Dark...
While opinions vary on the correct use of these patterns, the video is a helpful and easy to digest, reminder of them. The video description contains additional links.
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"Dark Patterns: Are Your Games Playing You?" - https://youtu.be/OCkO8mNK3Gg
As far as I can tell the main difference is a younger demographic and being more pop culture adjacent. I don't think that should affect whether you consider it "bad" monetization, but I will concede that context is important with these sort of things.
They don't straddle any lines, they're well beyond it. Stash tabs are de facto required for trade. One can, technically, play without trade and complete all the game content but the ones actually capable of that are putting in tons of hours and they will definitely use extra stash space.
There isn't really a target player that plays POE for free aside from those that are just trying it out. That's all fine with me but if you're going to get into the game, you're going to pay money.
But it's certainly not required for ssf, you can complete the game without it.
The relationship between EXP and levels in each season only really reward you if you have a battle pass - so the more you play the more the pass seems like an attractive purchase. Once you have the pass, you're then encouraged to play more than you might otherwise want to in order to max out the time-limited rewards.
[0] https://www.darkpattern.games/game/18554/0/hyperrogue.html
And this is true. In particular, competition where you gain rewards for staying on top of leaderboards, and there is a pay-to-win element. Competition isn't necessarily bad, competition can be fun, "but how is this game using competition" something you should think about before you get into a new game.
Sure there are some solitaire card games, and toys like yo-yos, kendama and the like that could be classified as games. But competition defines most of what we consider "games" up until computers were able to simulate the other players in the form of hostile/friendly npcs, computer controlled 'players' etc.
Archery, for example, has its roots in improving your skills for the battlefield. But archery as an hobby, which goes back as long as the bow was invented, is simply for the enjoyment of doing it.
Kids playing together with toys is not a competition. Lego/Meccano/building blocks. The list goes on.
> Trying to save your ego or pride by pretending is silly.
Now you really convinced me!
But they are. That you disagree is immaterial.
> Now you really convinced me!
Convincing you isn't important to me. Correcting you is.
> Convincing you isn't important to me. Correcting you is.
Truly, a martyr for the greater good.
I don't need it. English does as well. Your desire to change the definitions of things to suit your narrative means you are wrong.
> Truly, a martyr for the greater good.
Better that than a martyr for ignorance.
The venn diagram between 'mechanics that make games fun' and 'dark patterns' (as described by this site) is basically a circle. The important thing isn't the patterns themselves, it's that they're used to make you spend money on microtransactions.
Looking at just the mechanics divorced of any context of the surrounding business/marketing/monetization is missing the point.
I don't really think Daily Rewards are a fun mechanic. Nor is Friend Spam, and Social Pyramid Scheme is rarely fun either.
Infinite Treadmill - Impossible to win or complete the game.
Variable Rewards - Unpredictable or random rewards are more addictive than a predictable schedule.
Can't Pause or Save - The game does not allow you to stop playing whenever you want.
Grinding - Being required to perform repetitive and tedious tasks to advance.
Competition - The game makes you compete against other players.
To the die hard players, the infinite grind is a feature, treadmills help them reach whatever insane goals the developers have to keep cooking up so that they're satisfied.
Watching Arc Raiders evolve recently is a great example. It's trying to cater to casual players. It is going well now, but the die hards are going to ruin that experience I can promise. Then the die hards will be all that remain, and they'll have to cater to them.
The difference between a casual player and a die hard can be, 30hrs in a year played. And 5000 hrs in a year played. Some people play like it's their job.
I think it's much harder to be healthy when 6+hrs of your day is gaming. Especially if you also have work. It takes time to eat healthy, excercise, get out into the sun and be social. At some point you must be making compromises to game 6hrs a day.
I'd also like to question the idea that that multiplayer games are being treated inherently "unfair" here or that these features aren't worth acknowledging as a dark pattern just because they're core to certain genres. I like Minecraft and there's variable drops and achievements and grinding and multiplayer and a bunch of other "dark patterns". I also like to straight up gamble occasionally, and I'm not a gambling addict as of the writing of this comment. It's more the awareness of things that can psychologically hook you that's important, and then you can do what you want with that (or for parents, they can attempt to restrict applications as they find appropriate).
Competition is a fundamental part of Play. Humans (and other animals) are social creatures and learn via playing and competing with others.
Can people play games by themselves? Yes.
Is competitive play bad or a dark pattern? Not at all.
- infinite treadmill: theoretically you can play all possible moves but not in a lifetime.
- variable rewards: sometimes you stumble upon (or try) a tactic that works.
- can't pause or save: except when you maybe play against a computer which is not the point of the game
- grinding: you need to play the same openings many many times to encounter all the responses that will let you know if your "build" is worthy
- competition: nothing to add
Famous games span multiple years or decades and are also done across continents over a phone line. Chess is very pausable.
> - grinding: you need to play the same openings many many times to encounter all the responses that will let you know if your "build" is worthy
You can start from a given state to try things out. You can even start from non-reachable states if you want to.
My advice is to force yourself to stop playing after each single match, but that's hard when you're in a loosing streak because you want to win at least one match.
Paul Morphy has to become the best chess player before he understood that chess was a waste of time. He said that it's important to know the game well but there's a limit.
Though, learning them and being aware of them is not bad. But I'm curious how much the phrasing pushes the mindset of the readers in the wrong direction.
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
Author: Natasha Dow Schüll
Unfortunately, the manual part of it (reviewing user submissions) is too much for one person (me), but it should be fairly useful still.
> Definition: A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer.
And also the detailed descriptions of each of the dark patterns, for example:
https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html
Quoting just the short descriptions of the dark patterns without considering the definition above is effectively mischaracterizing the intent of the website and not using the tool as intended, and all the patterns seem like they can be/are just enjoyable mechanics to many.
Some of the users reviewing games on the website seem to also miss the point (inaccurate reviews), which leads to comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947761#45948330.
It is increasingly often the case in predatory games that a very subtle combination of the mechanics listed make them dark patterns collectively, so it's also important to consider the patterns in groups.
The healthiest games are consistently ones where you pay one large amount upfront, and then are never bothered about money again, because there is nothing else to buy. The developers are so confident you will enjoy it they don't bother with free trial offers. If you really don't like it, you just return for a full refund. Feels good.
(Edit: added stuff in parens)
I want to make games, but I know how much time that takes, so I understand that to make something cool I need funding to be able to focus on that cool thing. Crypto can be a tool in this case, and I personally would prefer mining to watching ads.
Hackers are great and analyzing systems and figuring out what they might support, despite the original designer's intentions.
You might be interested to watch this video entitled Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4 , which has been referenced by many YouTube analysis, and for good reason.
Also, this paper was a nice read for me: Predatory monetization schemes in video games and internet gaming disorder (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325479259_Predatory...)
Sure, being unable to pause the game isn't necessarily the developer being evil, but it's good to have a website that tells you about it before you buy the game.
I think you just need to interpret a game having a low score as there being some parts of the game that you might want to know about before buying/playing rather than "this game is evil".
In the same way that, when a film is rated 18, I can check whether that means it's going to scar me for life or if it shows a nipple for 2 seconds.
I'm even thinking about naming it something like `Pay Upfront: Strategy Game` to underline the single purchase model, but perhaps it's silly to go that far?
Not sure about this one. The “defeat 20 enemies” task could be a pointless checkbox, but it could also be an excuse for a fun quest. I could see this pattern not being “dark”, when applied in a user friendly way.
Then again, this is from an article about app badges and I never saw a game use those in a user friendly at all.
I have a close friend who buried his depression under a pile of games built around these temporal reward loops. He’s not working and still living with his parents at 40.
Thank you for sharing this - awareness of these patterns needs to be spread.
A better approach might be to highlight the fraction of mobile games that deserve more recognition for avoiding dark patterns, like this site does:
https://nobsgames.stavros.io/android/
Alternately, focus on AAA games.
When someone plays a game, the user's goal could be expected as "having fun for as much time as they want to." Being addictive is usually in service of that. A "slightly dark" pattern would be combining core addictive gameplay junctures with microtransactions (retry/next level/upgrade) — but in this economy this just feels like a basic mobile game business model. A moderately darker pattern would be making the game increasingly frustrating while still addictive, unless you perform a microtxn (eg: increasing difficulty exponentially, and charging money for more lives/retries or forcing more ads).
A "true dark pattern" would be sneaking things like push notification permissions, tracking permissions, recurring subscription agreements, etc. under an interface that looks similar to something the user doesn't read carefully and tries to get past out of habit, such as an interstitial ad with a "skip" button — but with a below-the-fold toggle button defaulted to "agree" and a "Confirm" button styled to look like the "skip" button at first glance.
In the before times, there was a browser-only MMO called Urban Dead[1] which had a cap on the number of actions any player could take in a single 24-hour period. This was to avoid giving undue influence/advantage to players who could play more during the day and disadvantaging people who e.g. had to work during the day and could only play in the evenings. I played a lot of UD in its heyday and thought it worked really well.
That said,
>A "true dark pattern" would be sneaking things like push notification permissions, tracking permissions, recurring subscription agreements, etc. under an interface that looks similar to something the user doesn't read carefully and tries to get past out of habit, such as an interstitial ad with a "skip" button — but with a below-the-fold toggle button defaulted to "agree" and a "Confirm" button styled to look like the "skip" button at first glance.
There are lots of "true dark patterns" that are not deceptive UI elements. Loot boxes that require expensive keys comes to mind. Same with brutal grinds that can only be bypassed by pay-to-win booster items.
[0] https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/30/wait-to-play.html
Yeah I used to enjoy those games. But I dont think thats necessarily what they are referring to here.
>Another common in-game timer is related to "harvesting" or "research". You may send your character off to harvest some resources, but you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time before this task is completed. This forces you to stop playing and wait for the timer to expire. Often there is a way to pay money or watch an advertisement to accelerate or skip the timer.
>Games that prevent you from playing them whenever you want are trying to get you to space out your playing throughout the day. This is a much better way for you to develop a habit of playing the game, and also a way to prevent players from reaching the end of a short game or getting burnt out on a repetitive game in a relatively short amount of time.
In a modern wait to play, you can bypass the restriction by spending money, or you are simply bounced back into ads multiple times during the day as you log in at every increment to press the next button.
I disagree. Being addictive leads to it being hard to stop playing when you are done, and sometimes hard to avoid playing, which leads to playing even when you would like to be doing something else.
when i was 10, an old neighborhood showed me how the late game of Tibia was like and how that wouldn't ever change and how dumb i would be if i not paid the premium account, which would lead me there much faster and being obligatory if i wanted to make war/pvp. i politely refused invitations for playing WOW when i was in high-school with other friend i made and i'm greatful for that. i would never read so many books and watch so many films on that timeframe if i was grinding levels on the same area killing the same monsters, watching the same animation
[0] https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-136-2-151.pdf [0] https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341394317_Prosocial... [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/prosoci... [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2704015/ [0] https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2020.29205....
There are probably a lot of open world RPGs which are all good.
The linked site lists a lot of patterns that any game with an RPG like unlock system or item collection system will contain, like (some) grinding and Endowed value. Personally I feel that this is only a dark pattern when it goes beyond motivation for fun and into "I can't stop playing" addictive qualities.
hmm people say it's pay to progress not win
Its not "Pay to Win" until you reach max level. Because the matchmaking always ensures theres some people of lower level, and some people of higher level (if they exist) in every match. This means that you want upgrades to overcome obstacles, but even if you buy progress, you still hit obstacles requiring upgrades. Its an infinite grind treadmill.
Just like how there are apps that gamify getting through tasks, gamify chores, etc. They aren’t really dark patterns in this context.
You can learn more about Danger World at https://danger.world
Grind or collecting items is suggested as a dark pattern. Dead cells is an amazing game and it has both of these. Most rogue lites use these both patterns heavily.
I don't see grinding as a hard no. I don't mind repeating if game makes feel I am making progress and getting something in return which dead cells do amazingly well. Grind needs some better definition on the website probably. Same for collecting items (what about coins in Mario).
I also don't agree if you're implying this optimization is intentional. It's often just a way to make the game longer. People don't like a game they complete quickly
Description: "You work for a dystopian surveillance state and spy on your neighbors."
Saw one where powercreep is considered unhealthy ...if you played a competitive card game without power creep you'd quit because the first meta would be the only meta. Controlled power creep is healthy for game longevity.
We have seen the forever sticker price in mega hit indies ala Stardew Valley or Terraria but I don't think that is really healthy to expect for gaming as a whole and is more that small teams hit a home run.
Your argument seems to be “won’t someone please think of the poor defenseless billion-dollar international megacorporations?”.
That doesn't mean that's the only way to be a good game, and I don't necessarily have an issue with powercreep. If it's mild and expected, powercreep can also be a way to handicap... If you're introducing new people to a game, maybe you let them use current cards and you use 5 year old cards (or whatever), they get to practice with current cards, get to experience old cards, you get some nostalgia from your old decks, and you don't have to sandbag, because they've got an advantage.
Using Arknights an an example it has a power creep as 5/10 despite being possible to clear current endgame with only 4* operators, which are essentially guaranteed as a free to play.And the bulk of them being added at the games release.